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Dessert

Lemon Bread Pudding, Boiled

A boiled pudding made from suet, bread crumbs, flour, sugar, lemon rind and juice, milk, and eggs, served with a lemon sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,466 recipes. Both carry 2-undecenal, which smells sweet. The science ↓

Lemon Bread Pudding, Boiled

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. In a bowl, mix the suet, salt, bread crumbs, flour, sugar, lemon rind, lemon juice, milk, and beaten eggs until thoroughly combined.

  2. Butter a pudding mold generously and decorate the inside with raisins, candied fruit, or sliced lemon rind.

  3. Pour the pudding mixture into the mold and cover it with a floured cloth.

Boil and serve

  1. Place the mold in boiling water and boil for about 3 hours until cooked through.

  2. To serve, turn the pudding out onto a dish and pour around it a sauce made by simmering lemon rind, lemon juice, and sugar in water for 20 minutes, adding a few drops of cochineal and gin before serving.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  2. Beef + milktop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,759 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

  3. Beef + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

  4. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  5. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Bind the mixture and help set the pudding as it cooks.
Bread crumbs
Form the body of the pudding and soak up the milk and liquid.
Beef suet
Adds richness and a moist, tender texture as it melts during cooking.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps flavor the pudding and the sauce.
Milk
Moistens the crumbs and adds softness to the custard-like crumb.

The step that matters

Boiling the pudding in the mold. The pudding must stay submerged in gently boiling water for the full time, with the cloth sealing the mold. If the water drops or the mold is uncovered, the pudding can cook unevenly or turn out dry, and the steady heat is what sets the eggs and crumbs.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, bread, flour, sugar, milk, egg):

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, bread, flour, sugar, milk, egg. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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